True North

By Heather Ehrman Krill

Andrew and Elizabeth have been able to have two children thanks to the help of in vitro fertilization, and now they have decided to make their remaining ten embryos available for adoption by others. Their choice creates ripples through the lives of their two children, Michelle and Stephen, and of two others born from their embryos, Caroline and Brian, who were transferred as embryos to a lesbian couple.

Set between the White Mountains and seacoast of New Hampshire, these four teenagers discover by accident that they are siblings. When Caroline develops pediatric leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant, her mothers must search for the family whose embryos they had selected from a fertility clinic sixteen years earlier. The tragic illness draws the two families together, bringing to light a secret that has been hidden for years. Over the course of one school year, the young characters and their parents navigate depression, substance abuse, developing sexuality, homophobia, chronic illness, and suicide. They represent only part of the complexity comprising todays modern family, with each member in search of his or her true north.

This novel tells a tale of four teenagers struggling with the different challenges of youth as well as the uncommon revelation of their origin and relationships as genetic siblings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504959032

Heather Ehrman Krill

Heather Ehrman Krill is a teacher and writer living in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her husband and children. She grew up in Merrimack, New Hampshire, graduated from Connecticut College with a bachelor’s in English, and Plymouth State University with a master’s in Education.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Potential energy, as defined by Merriam Webster, is the amount of energy a thing has because of its position or because of the arrangement of its parts.

One Young Man with a Very Old Soul

I was thirteen when I ended my life. It doesn’t matter why at this point, except maybe to those I left behind all those years ago, including my sisters, brothers, parents, and countless relatives and friends. Why did I take my own life? I could say I was being bullied, or struggling with my sexual identity, or couldn’t handle living with my mentally ill mother or dealing with a depression so deep that living was not a viable option. I could say that I’m happier here in heaven, because I no longer feel sad, but that would not be the complete truth. I simply don’t feel anything here, and I’m ready to give the living world another try. I fully understand why we might not have a choice in the family we end up with, but if I could make one request, I would like to have a brother or a sister. I think that’s important.

One Young Woman with a Very Old Soul

I was twelve when leukemia ended my life. At the time, it was surprising that I would die in that moment, when I had battled death many times and always pulled through. Mostly, I miss my parents and my friends from school. Kids don’t realize how good they have it until it’s too late and they become adults. Or they don’t become anything because something happens that takes them away before they reach their potential, what they could become.

I think I would have made a good teacher, or maybe even a nurse, since I was lucky enough to have so many on my team, helping me to fight my fight against the cancer that ultimately took my last breath. Looking back from up here, if I had the chance to live again, I would be a scientist or research biologist or even a doctor to help rid the world of all forms of cancer. I would be cool with being someone’s only child again, but if I am destined to have more than one sibling, please let me be born first. That way I’ll be someone’s only, even if just for a little while. I think that’s important.

Another Young Man with a Very Old Soul

I was sixteen when a cardiac birth defect ended my life. Up to that moment, I had been living the dream: I was president of my class, the girls loved me, my friends loved me, and my family loved me. Don’t get me wrong; life wasn’t perfect. But I didn’t have a lot to complain about, and I was headed in the right direction. My plan was to run for public office one day and make some big changes in our world, and people would have voted for me too. I had charisma, they told me, and lots of it.

And then, one morning, I didn’t wake up. It was like a dream, watching from up above. Why couldn’t I make my body move? Why couldn’t I take a breath? Why would my mom have to find me like that in the morning? It didn’t seem fair that something I didn’t even know about could end my life before I was good and ready—or good and old.

In my next life, I’d like to reach some potential other than tenth grade and a driver’s license. Also, I had a brother in my first life, and he was awesome, my best friend, really. But if living is all about new experiences, I would like to know what it’s like to have a sister, even if she turns out to be a pain in the ass. I think that’s important.

Another Young Woman with a Very Old Soul

I was fourteen when a teenage drunk driver ended my life. My friends and I were walking back from King Kone, which is on a busy main road in Merrimack. It was Friday night about nine, and we were walking to Olivia’s house—a seemingly harmless activity for four freshmen in high school. I suppose we should have been on the other side of the road, but with Olivia’s house so close, we stayed put. So we were walking with the traffic instead of against it.

So none of us saw the car drift over the white line and onto the grass. We were walking and laughing about an incident earlier in the day; I couldn’t tell you what had been so funny. Olivia must have looked back, because I remember her screaming. Then I remember looking down on the scene of ambulances, plus dads who had been having ice cream with their kids and were trying to direct traffic.

It was too late for me, but they were able to save Olivia, Ella, and Hazel, who went on to reach their potential in life. They became a photographer, a social worker, and a marine biologists—and mothers. So I would really like to head back to the world and finish something important and be someone important to someone again. I would take on the role of daughter, son, brother, or sister—whatever you need me to be. But I would like to go back to New Hampshire if possible, as I really loved growing up there as a kid. That’s my one request, if we are allowed to make requests. This isn’t prison; it’s heaven, so we should be able to make requests. I think that’s important.

Inner Compass Instruction Manual

(Provided to each soul before returning to life on earth)

Materials needed:

One human body

One internal compass

Previous souls

An endless human support network

No assembly required

Directions for use:

1. Be ready to return for another life based on lives lived previously and lessons learned.

2. Have a sense of your true north, which makes you ready to focus your attention on building relationships, taking on challenges, and pursuing your passion.

3. You are born with an internal compass within your soul. This compass stays with you throughout each lifetime. Its needle is in the direction you are to travel. There are times when you get off course or lose sight of true north. You may require support from the souls surrounding you in that time and place. You may also be supported by souls who lived in and around you in a previous lifetime. This occurs when the soul is energized by the lives lived in a different body, a different place, and with different people. However, sometimes a soul may continue to travel among the same souls during different lifetimes. This is one facet of reincarnation.

4. At times, it may feel like a stranger is visiting in dreams, but this is the sensation of having an emotional echo or the vibration of having lived another life. You may feel as if someone is talking to you, advising you, and helping you to see the world in a different way. Remember, this is the body and soul’s way of growing stronger with each life lived.

5. You won’t remember having lived this past life and spending time in heaven. However, you will remember certain moments. This often happens through muscle memory: you feel you have ridden a bike before, assisted an elderly woman across the street, tasted joy on Christmas morning, or been betrayed by a good friend.

6. People depend on their faith and family, but you must also develop a trust in the internal compass that lives somewhere between you heart and your head. This inner strength is what sustains a soul on each trip back to earth and in the interim.

7. Some mountain roads pass through the height of the land. Years ago, only horses and the burliest of people traveled these pinnacles in the spirit of exploration. On a map, tiny lines with little space between them represent the steepest parts of the trail, where travel would be most difficult. As the spaces spread out, the trail becomes less steep, and the traveler is better able to enjoy the journey. Places exist like this all over in nature, where civilizations have built passages to peaks to catch glimpses from the very top of the world. There man and woman realize the ebb and flow of humanity—the mountains and valleys, the challenge and opportunity, the loves and losses of life. But, in the chaos of living, we sometimes forget and need gentle reminders to sojourn on toward our true north.

8. Teenagers, especially, can be tricky. Surviving adolescence is just a matter of degrees. It’s one thing to get off course for a little while and then be pulled back by your true north—that ever-important internal compass. However, if a teen continues off course for a mile or more, finding his or her way back is far more difficult because the distance between true north and magnetic north- the direction of travel- grows greater. Yet if teenagers are resourceful and don’t give up, signs and people can help them to reorient themselves to the right course, the forward direction of travel, the path they are meant to travel.

9. Losing your way in the world is scary. If possible, view the world from the top of a mountain on a clear, starry night or bright morning, and remember that you have lived before and will live again.

10. Finally, find true north and continue in that direction. Stop and rest, and follow rivers for a while, but always trust that you will find the path again. Also allow the souls nearby to support this process. Onward!

1

Kinetic energy is the energy associated with motion.

Andrew

When I was first paralyzed back in high school, my initial thoughts were not, Oh, shit, my legs don’t move. Will I survive this? What will I do now that my legs don’t work? Instead, I wondered, Will a girl ever want to date me? Will I be able to become a dad one day?

Now I think back to that April day when my wife, Elizabeth, and I, having been blessed with our two children, decided to put our remaining embryos up for adoption. I felt that life couldn’t get any better. I had been paralyzed in the prime of my young life, yet I had proven resilient. I had established a career, lived a full life, married a smart, lovely woman, and even been able to father children. Life had been very good to me.

Jolene, our in vitro fertilization nurse and lifeline throughout the three-year fertility process, had explained that our remaining ten embryos could be given to an infertile couple, giving them the opportunity to have children. The alternative, called discarding the embryos—that is, throwing them away—didn’t feel right. We had spent so many years trying to get pregnant without success due to my spinal cord injury, it seemed our best option was to pay it forward to help another family. When Dr. Carver, the psychologist assigned to assess our mental states, asked us to rate our attachment to the embryos, both Elizabeth and I settled on a two on a scale of one to ten—ten being not able to imagine the separation.

However, these embryos were not babies; they were simply the potential for life. Think about all the eggs released in the world each month that don’t meet up with a sperm; or the egg who does meet a sperm creating an embryo, which for whatever reason, doesn’t implant on the uterine lining; or actually implants but something isn’t quite right and the embryo stops growing. Crazy, right, that I’m a man who thinks about egg release and embryo development, but I spent more time thinking about trying to have a baby than most men would admit to. If the conditions are right, and the egg fertilizes, there is the potential for life. But there is only a potential, because things sometimes happen that don’t allow the embryo to become a healthy baby.

We were lucky. After three years of trying and thousands of dollars, our life potentials became babies, and our family was complete. Why wouldn’t we want to help give another couple the chance to be parents?

Initially, Elizabeth worried that if we donated the embryos, one of our children might meet a genetically related siblings in college—or somewhere—and fall in love. That was a worst-case scenario, I told her.

Dr. Lincoln, our fertility specialist, explained that the adoption process would be anonymous; when we signed the paperwork agreeing to permit another couple to adopt our frozen embryos, we released them from everything, including our ever wanting them back as children. However, she went on to say, that didn’t mean in ten or twenty years, the laws governing fertility and adoption couldn’t change, and we might have someone knocking on our door to find out if we are his or her biological parents. We checked the box allowing Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center to contact us through the court system if one or more of our embryos grew into a child who later developed a medical condition requiring a genetic match for a donation, such as of an organ or bone marrow.

The heavy wooden chairs in Dr. Carver’s office had green cushions. It was the same office we had sat in years earlier, when another doctor had determined we were sound enough to handle the up-and-down emotions and raging hormones that came with fertility treatments. Elizabeth teased me about fibbing on our initial screening when the doctor asked if there had been a history of mental illness in either of our families. I had been excited about the process of starting our new family and didn’t want to lose focus by explaining the serious medical history, depression, alcoholism, and mental health disorders that ran amok in my family tree. A first cousin had committed suicide as a teenager. An aunt had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Another first cousin had passed away in his sleep at only eighteen, and another from leukemia at twelve. I hadn’t listed any of those on the form, a decision Elizabeth felt would come back to bite us.

However, in this most recent visit, the last question Dr. Carver asked us was whether we had any restrictions on the embryos. Did we care who adopted our embryos—like religious preference, for example?

Of course not. Anybody who is okay with our professions, medical histories, etc., is welcome to choose our embryos, Elizabeth nervously rattled off, twisting her hands in her lap. Then she looked at me with her green eyes burning through my soul as if to say, Please don’t tell her what you really think!

I mulled it over for a moment and chose to keep quiet, thinking it would be unlikely that a gay